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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Best of 2021: Personal Essays

The Gradual Extinction of Softness , Chantha Nguon and Kim Green, Hippocampus Magazine , November 8, 2021

For this category, I’m recommending a moving, lyrical personal essay from Kim Green and Chantha Nguon. Nguon is a co-founder of a women’s social enterprise in rural northeastern Cambodia. For 10 years, these two friends have been collaborating on Nguon’s life story, through interviews and cooking sessions, which will eventually culminate into Slow Noodles , a memoir on food, loss, and recovered family recipes. This excerpt from the memoir-in-progress is an evocative piece on surviving the Cambodian genocide, and remembering the flavors, the memories, and the past that the Khmer Rouge regime tried to erase. It’s also sprinkled with “recipes,” made up of ingredients that reveal details of Nguon’s life, particularly of her childhood in Battambang: “Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy French-Catholic-school education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Separate her from home, country, and a reliable source of food.” I’ve read this gorgeous essay a number of times, and each time I pay attention to new details — aromas, tastes — which make me appreciate it even more. — Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Authors Chantha Nguon and Kim Green on the story they wish they’d written this year:

We both loved “ Cambodian Americans Are Ready to Share Their Cuisine, On Their Terms ” by Maryam Jillani in Condé Nast Traveler . It’s a great primer on Cambodian cuisine that acknowledges the diaspora’s collective trauma without dwelling on it. And we love how she highlights the artistry of chefs we follow and admire. We wish we had written it but are also thrilled that Jillani did it so well.

Aftermath , Briohny Doyle, Griffith Review , October 24, 2021

In her exquisite piece about the human condition in the age of COVID, climate change, and other calamities, Briohny Doyle challenges readers — and herself — to give up the ghost of renewal. “What is an ideal community, a good life,” Doyle asks, “if nothing is renewed, if we are working in and through catastrophe with only what we have now and in the face of what will be?” This question is more than essay fodder. It’s a mantra, an incantation — for us all. — Seyward Darby

Author Briohny Doyle ‘s personal essay recommendation:

I’m a long-time admirer of Vanessa Berry’s writing, which is always marked by assiduous curiosity and intimate detail. Gentle and Fierce — the title of her new collection — describes her writing as much as her animal subjects. This essay, “ Perec’s Cat ” is a wonderful example of her enviably light touch at work.

Ghosts , Vauhini Vara, The Believer , August 9, 2021

Even as artificial intelligence creeps across science and technology, bulldozing computational problems, we comfort ourselves in the face of such power by thinking there are some things a program simply can’t do. A program can’t be funny, can’t be fraught, can’t be human. And maybe it can’t. But in Vauhini Vara’s gutpunch of an essay, we begin to see the glimmer of otherwise. Unable to write about her sister’s death of a rare cancer years earlier, Vara began feeding the linguistic engine GPT-3 prompts about her sister — and over the course of nine increasingly stirring attempts, their two voices meld in a way that wipes away any preconceptions you might have brought to the piece. This isn’t a warning klaxon about robot overlords; it’s a bracing exploration of what can happen when we finally hold the mirror at the perfect angle. — Peter Rubin

Author Vanessa Angélica Villarreal on “Ghosts”:

“My own writing is largely a practice of communion with the dead—recording forgotten lives, lost records, documenting collective memory. I personally use tarot to tap into my own unconscious and excavate the buried material there, and have noted the recent trend of astrology apps and tarot on TikTok and the uncanny specificity of its algorithms to ensure the right message finds you. It is brilliant to use AI as a divination tool, and to explore what mathematical fabric algorithms might be connected to beyond our understanding.”

Contraindications , Alison Criscitiello, The Alpinist , September 17, 2017

Alison Criscitiello’s essay about her climbing partner Anna Smith has stayed with me for a long time. It starts off as a rollicking adventure story: Two best friends embarking on a climbing expedition to the Indian Himalayas. The affection and admiration the women share spills out of her words, “opposites in almost every way imaginable, end members constantly bringing one another closer to an elusive center.” It is not just an exquisitely told quest: It is also about true friendship — and the joy found in sharing beautiful experiences.

Then it becomes something else. When Criscitiello describes Anna’s death, it is raw; I felt her pain. The essay turns into a survival story: Surviving not only the physical challenge of getting Anna off the mountain, but the grief, shock, and loneliness overwhelming Criscitiello now that she “no longer had Anna tethered to me.” For three days, she stays with Anna before a team arrives to help take her body down. Even then, Criscitiello remains, “guarding her” until Anna is finally cremated “along the shores of the Beas River in the heart of Manali” and her ashes taken home. It is time spent remembering Anna, whose “strength emanated from her core” and whose spark “set my aspirations afire.” — Carolyn Wells

The Grief Artist , Traci Brimhall, Guernica Magazine , January 6, 2021

Brimhall’s essay explores the influence that art, process, and ritual have on dealing with grief and loss as she mourns her mother’s death and the end of her marriage. So many essays deal with grief, but few consider the shape of it through so many disparate lenses. As Brimhall makes art out of the unexpected, she weaves a strand of persistent, insistent hope for the reader. “I love that nothing is wasted,” she writes. “Everything is ripe for transformation.” This essay reminds me that despite the fact that humans struggle with loss and change, maybe we can learn something about ourselves if we choose to lean on process and routine. Maybe too, we can get better at being more human as we deal with things that end, be it a life, a friendship, a marriage, or even just a time in our lives. — Krista Stevens

Nonfiction Books » Essays

Adam gopnik on his favourite essay collections.

In Mid-Air: Points of View from over a Decade by Adam Gopnik

What makes a great essayist? Who had it, who didn’t? And whose work left the biggest mark on the New Yorker ? Longtime writer for the magazine, Adam Gopnik , picks out five masters of the craft

And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White

A Sad Heart At The Supermarket by Randall Jarrell

Visions Before Midnight by Clive James

Adam Gopnik on his Favourite Essay Collections - And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

1 And Even Now by Max Beerbohm

2 the common reader by virginia woolf, 3 essays of e.b. white by e.b. white, 4 a sad heart at the supermarket by randall jarrell, 5 visions before midnight by clive james.

B efore we get into the books, I wanted to ask you about essays generally. In your introduction to The Best American Essays of 2008 you have a rather nice phrase: “The essay is a classical form for short-winded Romantics.” What do you mean by that?

There are certain kinds of criticism that I think of as essentially essays – Clive James or Randall Jarrell’s criticism, for instance – whereas there are other critics whom I admire just as much – say [William] Empson and [WH] Auden – but whom I don’t think of as essayists. They’re superior literary critics.

Is the distinction to do with the presence of the “I” in their work?

The “I” need not appear in the piece, but it’s always implicit in the essay. Empson and Auden want to win you round to their point of view, Jarrell and James want to make their experience persuasive. Of course, one of the best ways of winning you round to a point of view is to make your experience persuasive, and one of the best ways to make your experience persuasive is to win you round to a point of view!

There are no absolute lines in this. But there does seem to me a real difference between the things Empson – who is an absolutely wonderful writer and an amazing companion – is trying to do in his critical articles and the things Jarrell is trying to do in his. Jarrell conceives of criticism poetically. That is, that it should have some of the surprise and delight of personal revelation: “ I felt this then, and I passed through the prism of a work of writing” rather than “this is a general truth of literature”.

With essayists, we feel we’re reading their first names rather than their honorifics. We’re reading Clive and Virginia and Randall rather than James and Woolf and Jarrell, in a way we never feel we’re reading William and Wystan rather than Empson and Auden.

You have written that the essay has an implicit politics to it, and that the job of the essay is “to drain the melodrama from overwrought debate and replace it with common sense and comedy”.

Did I say that? When you think [of essays] historically, beginning with Montaigne, one of the things Montaigne does – at a time of violent and feverish religious debate – is he makes the case for both and at once, for either and or, for the division within oneself. That there is no pure or certain state which we can be in in our mental lives.

Even someone as seemingly non-political as Max Beerbohm is placed at the intersection of all kinds of political passions – Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw’s socialism, Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism and so on – and he makes fun of them all. That’s one of the things that makes Beerbohm attractive. In a very decorous and mischievous way, he mocks that kind of ideological passion.

You mentioned Beerbohm. Let’s begin with his book And Even Now . You said his approach was to parody and make light of things. He was also a caricaturist. Do you see a link between his illustrations and his essays?

Yes, absolutely. He was a caricaturist with remarkable insight and relatively little malice in his parodies and cartoons. He found the pomposities of over-zealous ideology absurd. He also had a lovely vein of affection. One of my favourite of his picture-books is called Rossetti and H is Circle . It’s basically imaginary pictures of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites in their very complicated domestic life. The implicit theme of the whole book is that behind the Pre-Raphaelite dream of the perfect Botticelli nymph and the medieval romantic life is this very funny, furtive domestic life in Chelsea [London]. Constantly referring dream-life back to reality is another way Beerbohm works.

He’s an essayist who isn’t so widely read these days. Why do you think that is?

For me, Beerbohm has an almost dangerously perfect tone – a mixture of benign serenity and quiet intellectual authority that I think is the tone every essayist searches for. It’s not accidental that Beerbohm was influential on the first generation of The New Yorker writers, people like Wolcott Gibbs.

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One of the dangers of that tone, though, is that it can seem unduly complacent or self-satisfied. I suspect that the note of complacency in Beerbohm’s writing is kind of out of kilter with the times. It’s a note that was so hugely popular for 50 or 60 years that I guess it came to seem old-fashioned. If you ever read old collections of light editorials from The London Times , they all strive for the Beerbohm sound. Inevitably, when a sound gets imitated for too long it becomes a little empty.

Beerbohm is also not a writer of fanatic passion or political certainty. You can’t consult him directly for the quote you might need about the topic of the day. For those reasons, he’s gone a bit out of fashion. But he remains a wonderful writer, and for me the best witness of that period – the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the modern age.

What do you think he writes best about?

Literature. My favourite of his essays are ones like “A Clergyman”, which is a very close, loving analysis of an obscure passage of [James] Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson . A clergyman, identified in no other way, squeaks out a little objection to something Dr Johnson has said, and Johnson crushes him with his rejoinder. Beerbohm reflects on the lost and hidden life of this clergyman, who made one brief bid for literary immortality and whose name even Boswell couldn’t recall.

Let’s go on to another English essayist, Virginia Woolf . She wrote a great deal of non-fiction. Why does her writing in The Common Reader qualify as essays rather than what they strictly appear to be – reviews or criticism?

Exactly because we read Woolf for her tone – her equanimity, her ability to weave together a detached and usually very severe critical judgement with a tone of ruminative engagement. That’s a tone, as much as Beerbohm’s is in another way, which seems to me particularly enviable.

Is it, along with Beerbohm, a particularly English tone? The next three essayists we’re going to talk about are American or Australian.

I think that’s true. There’s a sense in which both Woolf and Beerbohm come after the age of Victorian literary industry. They both take for granted this common pool of Dickens , [George] Eliot and Trollope – writers of huge industry, enormous achievement and vast social observation – and they both make a quiet case for the miniature, for the perfectly wrought. So there’s a kind of running commentary on Victorian fiction in both of their work.

I also think, without having illusions about the nature of the societies in which they worked, that there is a strong lure of a stable and secure literary society in their work. They both feel themselves to be at home with literature, not out of place in any way. Their tone – unlike certain American essayists – does not give a sense of having an uncertain or anxious relationship to literature.

That sense is certainly something you get from the title essay of Jarrell’s collection.

Next, you have gone with a collection of EB White ’s essays. He is one of the most iconic New Yorker writers.

White, for me, is the great maker of the New Yorker style. Though it seems self-serving for me to say it, I think that style was the next step in the creation of the essay tone. One of the things White does is use a lot of the habits of the American newspaper in his essays. He is a genuinely simple, spare, understated writer. In the presence of White, even writers as inspired as Woolf and Beerbohm suddenly look stuffy and literary. White has an amazing ability, which I still marvel at, to come very close to a faux-naïve simplicity that’s excessive and then pull it back.

I’m just picking up one of his collections. I’m going to open it up at random and look for a sentence that captures White. Here’s one from a piece called “The Trailer Park”:

“Before sitting down to draft a preamble to the constitution of a world federations of democracies uniting free people under one banner, I decided I would mosey over to the trailer park at the edge of town and ask some of the campers whether they favoured any such idea of this union.”

The virtue of White’s kind of writing is to start with something that sounds pompous and editorial and then use a verb like “mosey over” to make it work. He cleans up the prose of the essay. Both Beerbohm and Woolf are belle-lettrist sort of writers and they connect to that leisurely tradition. White is a much more urbane and American writer.

What is the key “if you haven’t read any White, read this essay” essay for you?

Next up is A Sad Heart At The Supermarket . Randall Jarrell is best known as a poet, rather than an essayist. Why are his essays worth reading?

Jarrell, for me, is the absolute master of what I like to think of as “cabaret criticism”. The man has endless wit. I think his novel Pictures From an Institution is the single wittiest book of the last century, even though I’ve read it 10 times and can never recall the story! He’s a very poor storyteller but an amazingly witty writer.

Jarrell is a comedian of a kind. He always finds something not just witty in a literary way but outright funny to say about extremely serious subjects – about Auden, [Robert] Graves, Laura Riding or Wallace Stevens. I admire that ability to turn straight, old-fashioned literary criticism into a constant performance in the best sense – into a form of entertainment in itself. He supplied a new tone of enormous, wonderful excitability. That’s one of the things I love about Jarrell, and one of the things I struggle to infuse my own work with – a sense of excitement and pleasure even in the driest texts. Most of all he’s just a wonderful joker.

Do you have any favourite lines of his?

Again, let me open the book and take a sentence at random. Here’s one. He’s writing about [Walt] Whitman:

“The interesting thing about Whitman’s worst language (for, just as few poets have ever written better, few poets have written worse) is how unusually absurd, how really ingeniously bad, such language is.”

It’s that tone of hyperbolic excitability in the presence of literature, which is a constant antidote to the solemnity and false seriousness of most literary study.

You mention that Jarrell is a model you seek to emulate. But in terms of taste, at least, you’re a very different kind of writer. In the title essay of A Sad Heart at the Supermarket Jarrell is very wary of popular culture, whereas in last week’s New Yorker you compare the Book of Revelations to Transformers. Love of popular culture runs through your work.

That’s very true. I think all the interesting writers of my generation drew the high brow-low brow line in a very different way to Jarrell’s generation. We all came of age – I’m thinking of Louis Menand or Martin Amis or Clive James – when there seemed to be more genuine artistic energy in popular culture, movies and rock music in particular, than there was in high culture. The experience of The Beatles or Fellini or the Godfather films illuminated our understanding of high culture, rather than the other way around. I think that is a true fault line in the history of modern writing – you’re either on one side of it or the other.

Do you think for Jarrell and his contemporaries it was a lack of genuinely great pop culture in their time that put them off? Or was it a generational thing where they couldn’t get on board with the idea that pop culture, even if very good, is something you can consider seriously alongside high culture?

A little of both. Jarrell writes wonderfully about race cars and American football . He was no snob. But as far as I remember he never references jazz – which is a kind of in-between form of pop culture, more culture than pop in lots of ways. You have to remember too that for Jarrell’s generation, the GI generation, they were in the process of recognising and discovering what we now think of as high culture.

My own father was one of that generation. For him, each piece of high culture he achieved, understood, enjoyed – whether it was Bach or Milton – was part of a mountain climbed. We all, in a sense, started too easily – somewhere up on the mountain – because of their work, and therefore had a different view of it.

Do you have a favourite Jarrell essay?

Your last choice is Visions Before Midnight by Clive James. How did you come across his work? He’s well known in Britain, especially for his TV career, but not so much in America.

In 1980, Knopf did an anthology of his essays called First Reactions . In a curious way it was an advantage to read him flat-out as a writer. All of my friends in England read him as an entanglement of personal presence and prose style. I read him simply as prose style, without any knowledge of what his personal presence was like.

What was it you liked about his writing?

He has some of Jarrell’s excitability in the presence of creative energy. He has the ability to bring you into his writing, even when he’s writing about things that are in some ways utterly trivial and often completely forgotten, like British TV of the 1970s. He has a way of turning each of those subjects into a wonderful essay – an exercise in cabaret criticism – about values.

Values, I think, are his real subject. The overriding lesson of his work is that categories – high art, low art, television, theatre – are misleading guides to value. That even runs at a deeper, moral level in James’s work about the larger categories – provincial and metropolitan, for instance. He’s a provincial guy who comes to the city, but his provincial experience is in lots of ways richer than his metropolitan experience. It’s the rejection of categories in place of values that is the Montaigne-like takeaway in all his work.

Did he have an influence on your writing, or were you far enough in your writing career to find him as a friend and ally rather than a mentor figure?

Whereas Jarrell, Beerbohm and White were in different ways direct elements in the long-simmering braise that produced my prose style, for whatever it’s worth, Clive came along when I was already, in some sense, a formed writer.

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But I did learn one very specific thing from his writing. He’s a very linear writer. His essays are always organised around sharp, direct and forward-pushing sentences. Whereas with Virginia Woolf your first response to one of her paragraphs, in the best way, is to read it again. Your first response to a Clive James piece is to keep on reading. I learned a great deal about how to make a piece propulsive from reading him.

And can you pick a favourite Clive James essay?

As with Woolf, the joy is cumulative – it’s the pleasure of reading all of his work. But here’s a good one. It’s a television column from December 3rd 1972 which goes from an argument between the philosophers Isaiah Berlin and Stuart Hampshire, to a documentary on “Bomber” Harris and the morality of area bombing, to a production of Oedipus Rex , to a new David Mercer play. In the midst of it, this comes up:

“Why, then, with all this talent [in the production of Oedipus], including a sumptuous lighting design that covers the décor with spiced gloom, does the production have so little sting? The answer, I think, is that there’s not much point in trying to supply a binding image to a play whose author was so intent on leaving imagery out. It’s difficult to think of Sophocles looking with favour on any attempt to pin his universalised theme to mere political instability.”

That’s a deep and original thought, perfectly expressed, which rises out of the normal eddies of TV journalism. That combination of range, ease and aphoristic subtlety is what I love in Clive’s work.

March 7, 2012

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31 page-turning memoirs to read in your lifetime, from searing essay collections to celebrity bestsellers

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Memoirs are the most personal account of nonfiction events.
They give readers an engaging narrative that navigates historical hardships or personal triumph.
The memoirs in this list were chosen for their unique stories and writing style.

Memoirs are hugely popular as readers gravitate towards the personal lens of real events, with the best ones almost reading like fiction. These remarkable, sometimes tragic, always inspirational stories bring us into the lives of people we've never met, giving us a wider understanding of humanity and of the promise one life can hold.

Each memoir on this list was chosen because it had a unique story with the potential to change how we understand the world. Some follow celebrities and others are a glimpse into the life of someone we probably never would have known. Capturing a human experience within the pages of a book is often raw and emotional, but so many of the memoirs in this list are also funny and highly entertaining. I'm thrilled to share with you my memoir recommendations because I feel these stories demand to be heard.

A formerly anonymous account of an infamous assault

"Know My Name" by Chanel Miller, free with Audible trial, $11.99 on Kindle, $16.20 for paperback

This is the best, most painful, most powerful memoir I have ever had the pleasure to read. I often go into books with no expectations of the author or the plot, so when the first chapters of this book introduced me to Chanel Miller and her story, I was floored. We've heard the name "Brock Turner" over and over, a convicted sexual assailant hailed for his swim records while an anonymous woman's letter circulated the internet. With the publication of this book, Chanel's words beg us to know her name and her story.

Memorable quote: "It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do."

An anecdotal Asian American essay collection

"Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning" by Cathy Park Hong, free with Audible trial, $13.99 on Kindle, $15.98 for paperback

"Minor Feelings" is an essay collection on what it means to experience racial stereotyping, historical trauma, and societal invalidation as an Asian American. This is an honest, original, and representative storytelling of identity and culture in a society where one of the most diverse demographics is often reduced to "the preferred minority." Especially with the recent rise of violence against Asian Americans , this is a crucial read, among many , to understand the ignorance and racism endured by Cathy Park Hong and so many others.

Memorable quote: "Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity.

Michelle Obama's wise and reflective life story

"Becoming" by Michelle Obama, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $11.89 for hardcover

There's something for everyone in "Becoming," no matter your political view or opinion of the Obama family. Michelle's life story is one of challenge and promise, hope, and perseverance. Her book begins with her childhood, through meeting Barack at a law firm, and continues all the way through her time in the White House. Her anecdotes and advice overflow with inspiration, empathy, and patience. Besides being absolutely delightful and refreshing, Michelle Obama's memoir further demonstrates why she's become such an icon for young women to become confident and inspiring women themselves.

Memorable quote: "At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be."

A grief-stricken memoir

"The Men We Reaped" by Jesmyn Ward, free with Audible trial, $10.04 on Kindle, $11.56 for hardcover

Jesmyn Ward (the author of " Sing, Unburied, Sing ") has lived through a lot of death, losing five men in her life in four years. She struggled with the "why" of it all until the answer became clear: though each man died of different causes, they all came back to racial and economic struggles. There is a lot of grief in her story as she navigates the statistics of racial poverty and their personalized effect on her, her family, and her community.

Memorable quote: "We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing."

A series of wildly entertaining restaurant adventures

"Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain, free with Audible trial, $12.60 on Kindle, $17.84 for hardcover

Hailed as an iconic chef, traveler, and journalist, Anthony Bourdain's memoir is a trip through all the hilariously bad behavior in the back of every great restaurant. Bourdain held nothing back in his storytelling, exposing the hidden and often dirty secrets to which anyone who has ever worked in a kitchen can attest. His words are that of a seasoned professional, a voice empty of arrogance but full of endearment for the often chaotic nature of the industry.

Memorable quote: "Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride."

The story of one woman's improbable success

"Educated" by Tara Westover, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $13 for hardcover

Tara came from a Mormon, survivalist mountain family; her father's fears of the end of the world dictated that the children would never receive an education, proper medical attention, or even have birth certificates. When she was accepted to Brigham Young University after spending years teaching herself math and grammar, her life became driven by her thirst for knowledge. Tara writes with poise, patience, and wisdom that radiates through her pursuit of self-identity, going beyond trauma and towards a balance between forgiveness from where she came and passion for where she's going.

Memorable quote: "'You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,' she says now. 'You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.'"

The fierce account of an unstoppable young woman

"I Am Malala" by Malala Yousafazi, free with Audible trial, $9.99 on Kindle, $8.30 for hardcover

On October 9, 2012, Malala Yousafazi was shot in the head while riding the bus home from school, having tirelessly fought for her right to an education. Malala has since become famous for her human rights advocacy, specifically for Pakistani women, and is the youngest woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. Her memoir is the story of the fight for freedom against seemingly impossible odds — about being a daughter in a world that values only sons, and speaking up even when everyone is trying to keep you quiet.

Memorable quote: " We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced."

The contemplative work of a terminally ill neurosurgeon

"When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi" free with Audible trial, $9.99 on Kindle, $14.64 for hardcover

What makes a life worth living? At 36, Paul Kalanithi was a life-saving neurosurgeon whose career came to a halt as he was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. Now a patient confronting his own mortality and seeking a broader understanding of this life , Paul digs into all of life's great questions as his own slips away. He lost his battle with cancer while writing this memoir, leaving much for us to think about as we continue on.

Memorable quote: "There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment."

A collection of personal essays on mental illness

"The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays" by Esmé Weijun Wang, free with Audible trial, $9.99 on Kindle, $12.53 for hardcover

By combining research in her personal essays, Esmé Weijun Wang explores schizophrenia both in her own mind and through the lens of our society as we struggle to understand and care for mental illness. The book begins with a technical explanation of schizoaffective disorders and their effects, providing a necessary perspective on which her memoir is based. Her stories are extremely important, a candid telling of exceptionally personal experiences in a world where she and her diagnosis are frequently misunderstood.

Memorable quote: "I tell myself that if I must live with a slippery mind, I want to know how to tether it too."

A father's letter to his son

"Between The World And Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $14.99 for hardcover

Told in the form of a letter to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates attempts to answer the biggest questions he's encountered in his life about race, America's history, and how to protect his son from an unforgiving world. The story is profoundly raw and real, one that combines our history with the current political climate and will undoubtedly be hailed for years to come.

Memorable quote: "You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable."

A painfully honest story of getting lost in order to be found

"Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail" by Cheryl Strayed, free with Audible trial, $11.99 on Kindle, $16.53 for hardcover

Cheryl Strayed had almost zero hiking experience and no real training when she decided to embark on the Pacific Crest Trail which spans from the Mojave Desert to Washington State. Four years prior, her mother's death spurred a whirlwind of addiction, anger, and heartbreak that pushed her to the point of giving up. The story of her hike is a brutal and honest one. But in order to find herself again, Cheryl needs to come to terms with her mistakes — a journey into which she welcomes us in the form of this book.

Memorable quote: "How wild it was, to let it be."

One woman's journey from refugee to Congresswoman

"This Is What America Looks Like" by Ilhan Omar, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $16.59 for hardcover

Ilhan was one of seven children being raised by her father and grandfather when her family fled Somalia and found themselves in a refugee camp in Kenya. Surrounded by poverty, starvation, and death, it took four years for her family to reach Virginia. Determined to find her American Dream, Ilhan worked through every hardship to her election to Congress in 2019. Her memoir is an incredible account of Ilhan's determination to not only survive but thrive in environments that could have broken her. It is uniquely eye-opening and transparent, a look into her endurance through the impossible.

Memorable quote: "As a refugee who fled civil war as a child, I am still trying to figure out where I fit in — which is perhaps why the most important note I found sticking to the wall outside my office had only three words. You belong here."

A narrative of incarceration and justice

"Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $9.11 for paperback

Bryan was a young lawyer in Alabama when he founded the "Equal Justice Initiative" — a law office committed to defending prisoners wrongly convicted, too poor to afford proper representation, or those not given a fair trial. This memoir focuses on the early days of the firm and one of the first clients, Walter McMillian, a Black man wrongly convicted of murder. If you don't know much about the mass incarceration or racial inequality in America's justice system, this is a great place to start.

Memorable quote: "Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done."

A memoir that will make you feel alright, alright, alright

"Greenlights" by Matthew McConaughey, free with Audible trial, $14.99 on Kindle, $16.95 for hardcover

"Greenlights" is a memoir that radiates with McConaughey's iconic country-boy coolness through the printed words about life lessons, patience, "catching greenlights" and the wisdom that the "yellows and reds eventually turn green, too." Matthew McConaughey's novel reads like an old friend sitting down with you on the front porch as the sun sets on a summer night — it's supremely warm and comfortable, full of wisdom collected from nearly 50 years of Matthew's diaries.

Memorable quote: "Stepping in shit is inevitable, so let's either see it as good luck, or figure out how to do it less often."

An inside look at a rising political figure

"Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future" by Pete Buttigieg, free with Audible trial, free on Kindle for Prime members, $15.77 for hardcover

At 29, Pete Buttigieg was the youngest elected mayor in the nation and held a vision to revitalize South Bend, Indiana. In recent years, he has emerged onto the national political stage for his unparalleled successes, even holding his mayoral position when he deployed to Afghanistan as an officer in the Navy. His memoir is authentic, endearing, and optimistic. It's also a great way to learn more about Buttigieg's policies, accomplishments, and aspirations for the future of our country.

Memorable quote: "A river is made drop by drop."

A composition of a noteworthy Supreme Court Justice

"My Own Words" by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $9.18 for paperback

This is a collection of RBG's writings and speeches, with each chapter given an introduction to provide historical context. It spans a wide range of topics, from feminism to the inner workings of the Supreme Court. A combination of legal decisions, advice from her mother, and stories of her strides towards gender equality make for a lasting memoir of a woman whose legacy endures.

Memorable quote: "When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one's ability to persuade."

A memoir for a YA audience

"All Boys Aren't Blue" by George M. Johnson, free with Audible trial, $10.99 on Kindle, $14.10 for hardcover

Told in a series of essays, this memoir annotates the struggles of queer, Black boys and men in our society. For some readers, it's a reassurance that there is a place in this world for us to be uniquely ourselves and thrive despite setbacks. For others, it's a call to be the ally that could save a person's life. George M. Johnson's essays address tough subjects like toxic masculinity, consent, and questioning one's gender identity in an accessible way. The book is geared towards a young adult audience, making it a great outlet to explore gender, sexuality, and race by fostering supportive environments and open conversations.

Memorable quote: "The first person you are ever an activist for is yourself. If I wasn't gonna fight for me, who else was?"

A raw account of the long journey to loving oneself

"Over The Top" by Jonathan Van Ness, free with Audible trial, $11.99 on Kindle, $12.90 for paperback

I absolutely adore "Queer Eye" and Jonathan Van Ness's radiance, encouragement, and clearly genuine love for those around him. I picked up his memoir thinking it would be fun and light, but Jonathan also opens up about some hidden hardships like bullying, trauma, and addiction. Every bit of JVN's sparkling personality shines through his memoir, a demonstration of how bright and shiny we can become.

Memorable quote: "As scary as this can be I want you to know no matter how broken you feel, and how seemingly unlikely it is, we are never too broken to heal."

The dark years of an American musician's childhood

"Hollywood Park" by Mikel Jollett, free with Audible trial, $14.99 on Kindle, $14.74 for paperback

Mikel Jollett was born into the Church of Synanon, one of the country's most infamous cults. By cult law, Mikel was taken from his mother at six months old and raised in their "school," finally escaping years later with his mother and brother. This is the poetic yet painful story of a life both in and out of the cult, peppered with addiction, trauma, and abuse. Ultimately, this memoir is a testament to strength and love. The beginning is told through the perspective of a child, enduring the cruelties of the cult, but the voice morphs as Mikel escapes and begins to experience and understand the world more.

Memorable quote: "How long can you live with ghosts before deciding to become one?"

The childhood account of an iconic American poet

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, free with Audible trial, $6.99 on Kindle, $15.49 for paperback

This is a precious and painful memoir of a woman who shaped poetry and literature and is an idol to so many today. It spans Maya Angelou's childhood, addressing the abuse she endured and letting other women know they are not alone. This book, which has been banned in many schools and libraries, tells the story of how words saved Maya's life.

Memorable quote: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

The story of strained yet unconditional familial love

"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $7.09 for paperback

Jeannette Walls spent much of her life hiding the secrets of her nomadic and deeply dysfunctional childhood. One of four children born to wanderer parents, Jeannette's family found themselves settling down in a mining town in Virginia once their money ran out. The dysfunction escalated as her father used destructive means to try and escape the confines of "normal" life, leaving the children desperate for escape. This memoir spent over 440 weeks on the "New York Times" Bestseller list, a balance of bright successes and dark childhood hardships. It's interesting to feel Jeannette's withstanding love for her family, even as we the readers resent them more and more.

Memorable quote: "You should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. Everyone has something good about them. You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that."

One woman's notable spiritual journey

"Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert, free with Audible trial, $13.99 on Kindle, $15.67 for hardcover

"Eat, Pray, Love" has become such an undeniable classic in the 14 years since its publication. For a while, it had the reputation of the favorite amongst Mom Book Clubs, but Elizabeth Gilbert's pursuit of fulfillment in every aspect of her life is one we all might need. At 30, Elizabeth Gilbert hit an early mid-life crisis as she found herself deeply unhappy in a textbook-perfect life. The memoir follows her yearlong journey around the world after quitting her job, selling all her belongings, and setting off on a spiritual expedition.

Memorable quote: "This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something."

Barack Obama's newest memoir

"A Promised Land" by Barack Obama, free with Audible trial, $17.99 on Kindle, $23.23 for hardcover

I will admit, I'm still in the middle of reading this memoir and I am savoring it for as long as I can. Obama's work fills me with the warmth of nostalgia, even as I'm reading through some of the hardest days of his presidency. His intimate account of the events we saw plastered against the news for years is fiercely engaging, paired with the ease of writing as smooth as his voice. One of a series of future presidential memoirs by him, this one is captivating for the insight of a firsthand experience and the perspective gained in the years since his time in office.

Memorable quote: "Either you seize what may turn out to be the only chance you have, or you decide you're willing to live with the knowledge that the chance has passed you by."

A uniquely illustrated memoir

"The Fire Never Goes Out" by Noelle Stevenson, $9.99 on Kindle, $12.99 for paperback

A compilation of personal essays and mini-comics, Noelle's memoir is that of the roller coaster of a creative life. This one is for every reader with a creative side who understands the highs and lows of creating art. The memoir spans about eight years. so it's really interesting to see her work morph, pivot, and grow over the course of the book. We've all heard "a picture is worth a thousand words" but I was still surprised at how revealing her artwork was through her transformative young adult years.

Memorable quote: "Love your younger self, and let them die."

A harrowing holocaust account

"Night" by Elie Wiesel, free with Audible trial, $7.46 for paperback

This memoir is not for the faint of heart. It does not tiptoe around the atrocities of the Holocaust or cushion the horrors within the confines of a concentration camp. T his is Elie's story as his family was taken from their home in 1944 and detained in Auschwitz. It is a short read that will transport you to the center of the pain, the abuse, and the murder of the Holocaust.

Memorable quote: "To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time."

Sylvia Plath's vivid journal entries

"The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath," free with Audible trial, $9.99 on Kindle, $15.49 for paperback

Sylvia Path's journals were first published in 1982, though heavily abridged. This memoir is a compilation of the complete, unedited, and remarkably introspective journal entries of the last 12 years of Sylvia's life until her death at age 30. Her writing is intriguing and intimate and I often had to remind myself of her age — my perception was completely skewed by the maturity in her thoughts. If you ever loved her poetry or "The Bell Jar," this is one to pick up.

Memorable quote: "I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life."

Stephen King's advice and anecdotes

"On Writing" by Stephen King, free with Audible trial, $12.99 on Kindle, $14.56 for paperback

Both memoir and mentorship, "On Writing" is a must-read for any aspiring writer, Stephen King-lover, or storyteller. The stories about his life are largely entertaining, dating back to his love for books as a young child all the way through his prominent writing career. The advice and inspiration in his memoir are profound, with so many quotable moments you'll cling to long after you've finished the book.

Memorable quote: "The scariest moment is always just before you start."

Nelson Mandela's incredible story

"Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela, free with Audible trial, $11.99 on Kindle, $23.01 for paperback

When I was given Nelson Mandela's over- 700-page memoir, I was intimidated (to say the least). I'd known the most famous parts of his life — from his imprisonment to him receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — but this memoir blew me away with just how instrumental and powerful his work was. The writing is clear and direct, leaving his life lessons and personal experience to speak for themselves.

Memorable quote: "And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

An account of healing through non-traditional therapy

"Group: How One Therapist And A Circle of Strangers Saved My Life" by Christine Tate, free with Audible trial, $13.99 on Kindle, $14.49 for paperback

In her memoir about the saving grace of strangers, Christie Tate was a law student when dark thoughts led her to seek therapy and her therapist led her to a psychotherapy group. It's easy to find the dark humor in this memoir and get lost in the problems of complete strangers while happily ignoring our own (at least for a little while). Christie finds a deeper connection and a sense of intimacy with this group of strangers as they discuss sex, childhood, and destructive habits. It's a fantastic normalization of non-traditional therapy practices and a story that's simultaneously entertaining and comically uncomfortable.

Memorable quote: "If you're serious about getting into intimate relationships — becoming a real person, as you said — you need to feel every feeling you've been stifling since you were a kid. The loneliness, the anxiety, the anger, the terror."

An inspirational, gender-focused memoir

"Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story" by Jacob Tobia, free with Audible trial, $9.99 on Kindle, $26 for hardcover

I will absolutely never forget the day I wore purple lipstick for the first time and just happened to meet Jacob Tobia, who told me they loved the shade and asked where I got it. This tiny but affirming interaction between strangers is a testament to the kindness that radiates from Jacob everywhere they go — and in their memoir. Labeled "sissy" at a young age, Jacob grew to power a gender revolution alongside transgender, non-binary, and other gender-nonconforming folks. Their book is extremely vulnerable which allows us to take part in their journey and think about gender in ways we haven't before.

Memorable quote: "I'm sharing this with you because I want you to understand that telling a boy not to wear a dress is an act of spiritual murder."

The story of two famous podcast hosts

"Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered" by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, free with Audible trial, $9.99 on Kindle, $26 for hardcover

"My Favorite Murder: is one of the most popular true-crime murder podcasts out there. Since 2016, Karen and Georgia have sat down and swapped well-researched murder stories, telling them for the first time during recording so their reactions are real and hysterical. We've gotten to know these two through their podcast, but their memoir gives a more genuine look into the backstories behind their best advice to not get murdered (my personal favorite being "F** politeness.") Their writing is each reflective and witty, no matter how difficult the subject.

Memorable quote: "We barely get any time on this planet. Do not spend it pleasing other people."

Main content

100 Must-Read Essay Collections

Rebecca Hussey

Rebecca holds a PhD in English and is a professor at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. She teaches courses in composition, literature, and the arts. When she’s not reading or grading papers, she’s hanging out with her husband and son and/or riding her bike and/or buying books. She can't get enough of reading and writing about books, so she writes the bookish newsletter "Reading Indie," focusing on small press books and translations. Newsletter: Reading Indie Twitter: @ofbooksandbikes

View All posts by Rebecca Hussey

There’s something about a shiny new collection of essays that makes my heart beat a little faster. If you feel the same way, can we be friends? If not, might I suggest that perhaps you just haven’t found the right collection yet? I don’t expect everyone to love the thought of sitting down with a nice, juicy personal essay, but I also think the genre gets a bad rap because people associate it with the kind of thing they had to write in school.

Well, essays don’t have to be like the kind of thing you wrote in school. Essays can be anything, really. They can be personal, confessional, argumentative, informative, funny, sad, shocking, sexy, and all of the above. The best essayists can make any subject interesting. If I love an essayist, I’ll read whatever they write. I’ll follow their minds anywhere. Because that’s really what I want out of an essay — the sense that I’m spending time with an interesting mind. I want a companionable, challenging, smart, surprising voice in my head.

So below is my list, not of essay collections I think everybody “must read,” even if that’s what my title says, but collections I hope you will consider checking out if you want to.

1. Against Interpretation — Susan Sontag

2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere — André Aciman

3. American Romances — Rebecca Brown

4. Art & Ardor — Cynthia Ozick

5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited by Phillip Lopate

6. Bad Feminist — Roxane Gay

7. The Best American Essays of the Century — anthology, edited by Joyce Carol Oates

8. The Best American Essays series — published every year, series edited by Robert Atwan

9. Book of Days — Emily Fox Gordon

Book cover of The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

10. The Boys of My Youth — Jo Ann Beard

11. The Braindead Megaphone — George Saunders

12. Broken Republic: Three Essays — Arundhati Roy

13. Changing My Mind — Zadie Smith

14. A Collection of Essays — George Orwell

15. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf

16. Consider the Lobster — David Foster Wallace

17. The Crack-up — F. Scott Fitzgerald

18. Discontent and its Civilizations — Mohsin Hamid

19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric — Claudia Rankine

20. Dreaming of Hitler — Daphne Merkin

21. Self-Reliance and Other Essays — Ralph Waldo Emerson

22. The Empathy Exams — Leslie Jameson

23. Essays After Eighty — Donald Hall

24. Essays in Idleness — Yoshida Kenko

25. The Essays of Elia — Charles Lamb

26. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader — Anne Fadiman

27. A Field Guide to Getting Lost — Rebecca Solnit

28. Findings — Kathleen Jamie

29. The Fire Next Time — James Baldwin

30. The Folded Clock — Heidi Julavits

31. Forty-One False Starts — Janet Malcolm

32. How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America — Kiese Laymon

33. I Feel Bad About My Neck — Nora Ephron

34. I Just Lately Started Buying Wings — Kim Dana Kupperman

35. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction — anthology, edited by Lee Gutkind

36. In Praise of Shadows — Junichiro Tanizaki

37. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens — Alice Walker

38. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? — Mindy Kaling

39. I Was Told There’d Be Cake — Sloane Crosley

40. Karaoke Culture — Dubravka Ugresic

41. Labyrinths — Jorge Luis Borges

42. Living, Thinking, Looking — Siri Hustvedt

43. Loitering — Charles D’Ambrosio

44. Lunch With a Bigot — Amitava Kumar

45. Madness, Rack, and Honey — Mary Ruefle

46. Magic Hours — Tom Bissell

47. Meatless Days — Sara Suleri

48. Meaty — Samantha Irby

49. Meditations from a Movable Chair — Andre Dubus

50. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood — Mary McCarthy

51. Me Talk Pretty One Day — David Sedaris

52. Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal — Wendy S. Walters

53. My 1980s and Other Essays — Wayne Koestenbaum

54. The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and The Making of the American Essay — anthologies, edited by John D’Agata

55. The Norton Book of Personal Essays — anthology, edited by Joseph Epstein

56. Notes from No Man’s Land — Eula Biss

57. Notes of a Native Son — James Baldwin

58. Not That Kind of Girl — Lena Dunham

59. On Beauty and Being Just — Elaine Scarry

60. Once I Was Cool — Megan Stielstra

61. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write — Sarah Ruhl

62. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored — Adam Phillips

63. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence — Adrienne Rich

64. The Opposite of Loneliness — Marina Keegan

65. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Geoff Dyer

66. Paris to the Moon — Adam Gopnik

67. Passions of the Mind — A.S. Byatt

68. The Pillow Book — Sei Shonagon

69. A Place to Live — Natalia Ginzburg

70. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination — Toni Morrison

71. Pulphead — John Jeremiah Sullivan

72. Selected Essays — Michel de Montaigne

73. Shadow and Act — Ralph Ellison

74. Sidewalks — Valeria Luiselli

75. Sister Outsider — Audre Lorde

76. The Size of Thoughts — Nicholson Baker

77. Slouching Towards Bethlehem — Joan Didion

78. The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois

79. The Story About the Story — anthology, edited by J.C. Hallman

80. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again — David Foster Wallace

81. Ten Years in the Tub — Nick Hornby

82. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man — Henry Louis Gates

83. This Is Running for Your Life — Michelle Orange

84. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage — Ann Patchett

85. Tiny Beautiful Things — Cheryl Strayed

86. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture — Gerald Early

87. Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints — Joan Acocella

88. The Unspeakable — Meghan Daum

89. Vermeer in Bosnia — Lawrence Weschler

90. The Wave in the Mind — Ursula K. Le Guin

91. We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think — Shirley Hazzard

92. We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi

93. What Are People For? — Wendell Berry

94. When I Was a Child I Read Books — Marilynne Robinson

95. The White Album — Joan Didion

96. White Girls — Hilton Als

97. The Woman Warrior — Maxine Hong Kinston

98. The Writing Life — Annie Dillard

99. Writing With Intent — Margaret Atwood

100. You Don’t Have to Like Me — Alida Nugent

If you have a favorite essay collection I’ve missed here, let me know in the comments!

The Most Read Books on Goodreads This Week

These collections will have you bust out of your reading funk.

Sitting in the sun with a cold drink and a great book is one of life's greatest joys. Getting lost in the life of someone else can be the perfect way to relax. So, when you hit a reading slump it can be incredibly frustrating. It feels like picking up a book is an impossible chore and as Love Island has started and beer gardens have opened their doors, there are a lot of appealing distractions. So, here are some of the best essay collections to help you beat a summer reading slump. A novel may be too hard to get into but each of these collections is like sitting and having a frank conversation with a friend.

From sharing their love of bookshops and gardens to lifting the lid on what home really means, the essayists listed below have captured the rich tapestry of everyday life through their words. There’s something so comforting about getting lost in someone explaining their lived experiences, some you’ll be able to identify with and others that will open your eyes to something totally new.

You can dip into these essays one at a time or settle down to take the whole book in, in one go.

This article was originally published on July 4, 2021

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The Best Reviewed Books of 2021: Short Story Collections

Featuring haruki murakami, brandon taylor, elizabeth mccracken, kevin barry, lily king, and more.

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Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Short Story Collections .

1. Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco)

22 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read … The personality that animates Afterparties is unmistakably youthful, and the stories themselves are mainly built around conditions of youth—vexed and tender relationships with parents, awkward romances, nebulous worries about the future. But from his vantage on the evanescent bridge to maturity, So is puzzling out some big questions, ones that might be exigent from different vantages at any age. The stories are great fun to read—brimming over with life and energy and comic insight and deep feeling.”

–Deborah Eisenberg ( New York Review of Books )

2. Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

19 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

Read an interview with Brandon Taylor here

“Taylor plays the Lionel-Charles-Sophie storyline for all its awkwardness and resentment, but it can feel like a note held too long to suspend commitment, which is the resolution we’re trained to expect … The violence is neither glamorous nor gratuitous; it is senseless without being pointless. In contrast, Taylor presents such earnest moments of vulnerability in Anne of Cleves that my breath hitched … Some writers have the gift of perfect pitch when writing dialogue; Taylor’s gift is perfect tempo. In a band of writers, he’d be the drummer who sticks to a steady moderato. He neither rushes a story to its high notes nor drags the pace so that we can admire his voice. And as a plotter, he doesn’t rely on gasp-inducing reveals … Taylor’s superpower is compressing a lifetime of backstory into a paragraph – sometimes just a sentence … I’ve come to expect, in fiction, the story of the Sad Gay Youth who is rejected by his often religious family and thereafter becomes self-destructive or reckless. And while Taylor refracts versions of this story throughout the collection, he does so without overly romanticising it … He is a writer of enormous subtlety and of composure beyond his years.”

–Ian Williams ( The Guardian )

3. First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami (Knopf)

13 Rave • 17 Positive • 7 Mixed • 5 Pan

“… a blazing and brilliant return to form … a taut and tight, suspenseful and spellbinding, witty and wonderful group of eight stories … there isn’t a weak one in the bunch. The stories echo with Murakami’s preoccupations. Nostalgia and longing for the charged, evocative moments of young adulthood. Memory’s power and fragility; how identity forms from random decisions, ‘minor incidents,’ and chance encounters; the at once intransigent and fragile nature of the ‘self.’ Guilt, shame, and regret for mistakes made and people damaged by foolish or heartless choices. The power and potency of young love and the residual weight of fleeting erotic entanglements. Music’s power to make indelible impressions, elicit buried memories, connect otherwise very different people, and capture what words cannot. The themes become a kind of meter against which all the stories make their particular, chiming rhythms … The reading experience is unsettled by a pervasive blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, dream and waking … Most of the narrators foreground the act of telling and ruminate on the intention behind and effects of disclosing secrets, putting inchoate impulses, fears, or yearnings into clear, logical prose … This mesmerizing collection would make a superb introduction to Murakami for anyone who hasn’t yet fallen under his spell; his legion of devoted fans will gobble it up and beg for more.”

–Pricilla Gilman ( The Boston Globe )

4. That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry (Doubleday)

13 Rave • 10 Positive •1 Mixed

“There’s not a bad story in the bunch, and it’s as accomplished a book as Barry has ever written … Barry does an excellent job probing the psyche of his diffident protagonist, and ends the story with an unexpected moment of sweetness that’s anything but cloying—realism doesn’t need to be miserablism, he seems to hint; sometimes things actually do work out … Barry has a rare gift for crafting characters the reader cares about despite their flaws; in just 13 pages, he manages to make Hannah and Setanta come to life through sharp dialogue and keen observations … Barry proves to be a master of writing about both love and cruelty … Barry brilliantly evokes both the good and bad sides of love, and does so with stunningly gorgeous writing … There’s not an aspect of writing that Barry doesn’t excel at. His dialogue rings true, and he’s amazingly gifted at scene-setting—he evokes both the landscape of western Ireland and the landscape of the human heart beautifully. His greatest accomplishment, perhaps, is his understanding of the ways our collective psyche works; he seems to have an innate sense of why people behave the way we do, and exactly what we’re capable of, both good and bad.”

–Michael Schaub ( NPR )

5. Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove)

17 Rave • 1 Positive

Listen to an interview with Dantiel W. Moniz here

“Mortality is the undercurrent in Dantiel W. Moniz’s electrifying debut story collection, Milk Blood Heat , but where there’s death there is the whir of life, too. A lot of collections consist of some duds, yet every single page in this book is a shimmering seashell that contains the sound of multiple oceans. Reading one of Moniz’s stories is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing. The power in these stories rests in their veracity, vitality and vulnerability.”

–Michelle Filgate ( The Washington Post )

6. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth)

15 Rave 2 Positive

Read a story from The Dangers of Smoking in Bed here

“There’s something thrilling about other people’s suffering—at least within this collection’s 12 stories of death, sex and the occult. Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan … Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity … Largely it’s insatiable women, raggedy slum dwellers and dead children—those who are ordinarily powerless—who wield unholy power in this collection, and they seem uninterested in being reasonable. And Enriquez is particularly adept at capturing the single-minded intensity of teenage girls … If some of these stories end vaguely, the best ones close on the verge of some transgressive climax … To Enriquez, there’s pleasure in the perverse.”

–Chelsea Leu ( The New York Times Book Review )

7. The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)

13 Rave • 2 Positive • 1 Mixed

Read Elizabeth McCracken on savoring the mystery of stories here

“Elizabeth McCracken’s The Souvenir Museum begins with one of the funniest short stories I’ve read in a long time … I had to stop reading ‘The Irish Wedding’ several times to explain to my husband why I was laughing so hard. I kept thinking: I wish I were reading a whole book about these people … they’re all beguiling … This tale, like much of McCracken’s work, captures the mixed bag that characterizes most people’s lives … McCracken’s writing is never dull. She ends this fantastic collection with a second English wedding and its aftermath, nearly 20 years after the first, delivering happiness tempered by sobering circumstances—and a satisfying symmetry.”

–Heller McAlpin ( NPR )

8. Wild Swims by Dorthe Nors (Graywolf)

13 Rave • 1 Positive

Read an excerpt from Wild Swims here

“How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams … The stories are vivid the way a flash of immobilizing pain is vivid … Perhaps because they’re so very short and because they mostly sketch slight interior shifts in her characters, Nors’s stories all feel a little bashful, a little tender. Surely this is intentional … Most of her stories are too short to linger deeply in time or consciousness; the characters spin back into their silence almost as soon as they emerge on the page. Nors is a master at portraying female rage, but here there is also no violent explosion outward, instead a sort of inner collapse; her characters assiduously resist confronting their fury until it rises up against them and attacks their bodies … The sense of simultaneous, furious upwelling into text and retraction into shame or reticence gives the stories a powerful undercurrent, as if they were constantly wrestling with themselves. Inherently self-contradicting, they wobble interestingly on their axes, pulled between outraged individualism and the restrictive Janteloven.”

–Lauren Groff ( The New York Review of Books )

9. Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti (Graywolf)

12 Rave • 1 Mixed

Read an interview with Nana Nkweti here

“The pure energy of the words strikes first, the thrumming, soaring, frenetic pace of Nana Nkweti’s expression … None of these stories end with a miraculous healing. Even where revelations occur, they never erase scars. Nkweti uses genre tropes to subvert our expectations. She employs the zombie story, the fairy tale, and the confessional in order to invert conventions … The levity of Nkweti’s writing can make even passing descriptions a delight … Occasionally the writing veers into the overwrought … But the sheer speed of Nkweti’s expression allows for correction in midair, and her keen descriptive eye provides more pleasures than missteps … Her inventiveness dazzles.”

–Lee Thomas ( Los Angeles Review of Books )

10. My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson (Henry Holt)

9 Rave • 4 Positive 1 Mixed

Read Jocelyn Nicole Johnson on how writing “vengeful fiction” can make you a better person, here

“Jocelyn Nicole Johnson uses history to spectacular effect in her debut fiction collection … What makes My Monticello particularly resonant is that it does not stray far from life as we know it today. In the near future conjured by Johnson, there are the heat waves and wildfires that bring climate change into view. There is fallout from a fraught election. There is the vile replacement theory rhetoric of the right wing. But the lives of Johnson’s richly drawn characters—their personal stories—are always in focus. And, because of it, the storytelling is propulsive, as we follow these refugees along a harrowing journey, with danger ever at their heels. My Monticello is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it.”

–Anissa Gray ( The Washington Post )